how to keep page offline while creating

Just try one of the maintenance-plugins: https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/tags/maintenance/

Thx. Is there not a way to just keep it off the internet until ready? This is a new site, not yet published to the internet, as far as I know. At least I didn’t do anything to put it there. The Pages page makes it very confusing: some pages are “private” and others “public.” You can mark a page “private” but the message asks if you want to publish it privately. Anyway, the pages marked “private” and located under the “private” tab — are they online?

p.s. Thanks for your reply to my question about text missing from Contact Form 7. I still have not found a way to correct that.

The maintenante plugins in the list above make the entire website unavailable as long as you are not logged in. It does not matter whether a page or a post is password protected or not. Since non-logged in users don’t see anything, you can design and manage the pages as you want.

A page set to private is only that one page is publicly inaccessible. It is only accessible when you log in. Configuring each page you create so that no one sees it is very complex. Therefore my recommendation to the maintenance plugins.

By the way, you can always test this yourself by using another browser or the private mode of your browser to access your page not logged in.